for their new poetry collections Alkali Sink, The Orbit of Known Objects, and World as You Left It, respectively.

Thursday, April 2, 2015 - 7:30pm

In Alkali Sink, Beratlis’s debut collection, themes of family, loss, and the natural world weave together to create a universe of dichotomies at once dangerous and intimate, walking the line between the catastrophic and the sublime.

"A book that is at once sly and precise, honest and unique." —Julia Levine, author of Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight

presents Frank:A Life in Politicsfrom The Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage.

America’s smartest, feistiest, and funniest politician tells his own story.

How did a disheveled, intellectually combative gay Jew with a thick New Jersey–Massachusetts accent become one of the most effective politicians of his time?

In his candid and witty political memoir, Barney Frank relates his journey from the outskirts of New York City to Boston’s city hall and the Massachusetts legislature, and then to the U.S. Congress, where he played a vital role in the struggle for personal freedom and economic fairness for more than four decades. With his trademark directness and insight, Frank explores the emotional toll of living in the closet and how he became the first member of Congress to voluntarily disclose his homosexuality. And he chronicles his lifelong struggle against inequality, which culminated in cowriting the most significant Wall Street regulations since the Great Depression. He also demonstrates how he used his rhetorical skills to expose his opponents’ hypocrisies and delusions, and details the endless favors, grudges, and fears that compose a legislator’s career. From the Clinton impeachment to the economic meltdown of 2008 to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Frank’s words and deeds mattered, and Frank shows why. Here is a guide to how political change really happens—composed by a master of the art—and a testament to how Democrats, if they reject purism and passivity, can rebuild trust in an active government.

An incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.

In this diverse collection, Soto again offers prose that is robust, confessional, and peculiar in its observations. He addresses time. He considers aging. If each day of the week represented a decade, then Soto is now cruising late Saturday afternoon. As the clock’s gears relentlessly grind, he’s soon on Sunday—but Sunday morning! He still has time to enjoy the world about him.

Monday, April 13, 2015 - 7:30pm

Soto is a master essayist. His sharply refined sentences are worth a second read, with a pencil in hand. Soto’s world is quirky, captured in narrative that will soften readers with laughter and empathy. Like many boomers, he laments his sense of failure. Like them, he shrugs off that failure to recast his remaining years. He befriends daffodils, praises theater and tribute bands, and snuggles up with his wife of nearly forty years. This book is short enough to read in one sitting on the couch, and encourages a second reading with deeper pleasure in bed.

Berkeley is a college town with a global reputation that reaches even its most remote corners; or so Anthony Landau, an epidemiologist, has found over the course of four decades as a research professor and a mapper of disease outbreaks around the world. On a cool October evening in 2006, Landau—a “professional eunuch” with his best years of scientific globe-trotting behind him—just wants to settle down with a nice bit of salmon and a fruity New Zealand sauvignon blanc, but discovers the lifeless body of Samantha Bernstein Beevors, a long-ago colleague and lover, naked in his comfy bed.

As Landau circles his Berkeley wagons with the help of a few allies—Deena, his best friend/former lover and her law professor husband, and Georges, a chiropractor from New Jersey who “Frenchifies” his first name by adding an “s”—other women in his world wind up victims of gruesome murders, and soon both Berkeley’s uber-politically correct and Oakland’s not-quite-so-touchy-feely police departments close in.

"Antic, sexy, satirically deft, and of course funny, this novel is also, on both the personal and political levels, smart about the bottomlessness of our capacities for self-sabotage, and moving about the fierceness of our yearning to make good."--Jim Shepard

In this reverse love story set in Paris and London, a failed monogamist attempts to woo his wife back and to answer the question: Is it really possible to fall back in love with your spouse?

Please join our guest poet for a poetry-note session. For a few hours, Convers will write, just for you, a short poem on a subject or for a person of your choice. She will find the words to shape a personal poem that you or your loved one will enjoy.

Friday, April 17, 2015 - 11:00am to 2:00pm

Originally from the French part of Switzerland, Claude Convers speaks French, German and English, writing primarily in English. Over the years her personal artistic and creative process has unfolded through the visual arts, poetry, and various styles of dance. As a transpersonal life coach and teacher, Convers helps her clients move from a stressful life to a meaningful one through language, personal creativity, and inner wisdom. Her unique method combines the joy of exploration with mindful awareness and practicality.

A tiger cub has escaped from a reserve in the Sunderbans in West Bengal, India, and Neel, a poor boy from the islands, is determined to find her in order to save her from being captured and sold on the black market by Mr. Gupta and his men.

Whether your idea of gardening is a tomato plant on your fire escape or a pumpkin patch in the yard, Homegrown is the ultimate guide to growing your own food and eating it, too! With clear and uncomplicated illustrations, author Heather Hardison guides readers through the process of planting, growing, harvesting, and preparing more than 25 of the tastiest, easy-to-grow vegetables and small fruits.

A new American classic: a dynamic tale of triumph against the odds and the compelling story of one woman's struggle for equality that belongs alongside Jazz by Toni Morrison and The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

In this new book, Nobel Prize winner Stiglitz expands on the diagnosis he offered in The Price of Inequality and suggests ways to counter America s growing problem. With his signature blend of clarity and passion, Stiglitz argues that inequality is a choice the cumulative result of unjust policies and misguided priorities.

release party and reading for her poetry volume, Waiting to Be Called IF SF Publishing, $17. Available in-store only.

Claire Scott’s great accomplishment is in knowing how to make poetry out of every part of her life. She’s patient enough to hold opposites to the breaking point, and then to keep going toward that frontier where real poetry takes place. Each poem in Waiting to be Called lives in a world where nothing’s sacred and yet everything’s sacred. Just when you think she’s taking you to a place too dark to enter, Claire makes you laugh. And when you think a poem’s too funny to be a poem, Claire can make you cry. Scott’s a poet who knows all the dance steps, but is never confined by any one of them, able to tease her own unique electricity out of ordinary human experience where grief and despair, joy and happiness, tragedy and comedy co-exist, where every word comes to new life and means something that it’s never meant before.

Thursday, April 30, 2015 - 7:30pm

“A brilliant, eccentric, unique voice with a range that encompasses childhood violence and a God who comes to therapy. Claire Scott’s lean, beautifully crafted language dares to be cynical about the world but is never without a deep compassion. These are poems that will be read over and over again as a seismograph of our time. —Kim Chernin, author of In My Mother’s House, The Hungry Self

May 2015

Join us in celebrating books and indy bookselling on this festive day that will feature 16 exclusive books and art pieces. Included in the offerings are limited edition, unique items only available at participating bookstores, and only on May 2: a signed, original Chris Ware print; a signed chapbook of original essays by Roxane Gay; a Margaret Atwood stencil, a literary map of the seas; a color broadside from Stephen King's forthcoming novel, Finders Keepers. All this, and author readings and appearances. Watch this space for further developments!

"Ann Packer flawlessly executes the most daring, difficult and exhilarating feat in the novelist's repertoire: to re-create the history of an era and a place through the history of one family, finding intimacy in the sweep of time and import in the nuance of everyday life, pulling it off with mastery, authority and all the passionate artistry that lovers of her work have come to expect.”--Michael Chabon

A sweeping, masterful new novel that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades.

Maisie Dobbs returns in a powerful story of political intrigue and personal tragedy: a brutal murder in the British garrison town of Gibraltar leads the investigator into a web of lies, deceit, and danger.

With simple techniques including sculpture, printmaking, bookbinding, collage, and
even ideas for public art, families work through step-by-step instructions while using
imagination and budding aesthetics.

This book goes beyond the typical paper craft project to include contemporary design
references like Mid-Century Modern dollhouses, VW buses, paper monsters,
costumes and masks, and the classic lemonade stand--all made with unique style and
flair!

A twisted and haunting tale about three teens uncovering dark secrets and even darker truths about themselves.

When nearly killing a classmate gets seventeen-year-old Sadie Su kicked out of her third boarding school in four years, she returns to her family's California vineyard estate. Here, she's meant to stay out of trouble. Here, she's meant to do a lot of things. But it's hard. She's bored. And when Sadie's bored, the only thing she likes is trouble.